


February Words #21: Strange

by StaringAtTheTwinSuns



Series: February Words (2018) [20]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Family Dynamics, Family Issues, Incest, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Sibling Incest, Twincest, Young Ben Solo, good father han solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 03:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13754967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaringAtTheTwinSuns/pseuds/StaringAtTheTwinSuns
Summary: Ben’s old enough to realize that his family isn’t exactly normal. Han’s probably not the best person to explain it to him, but he’s got to try.Loosely related to other stories in this series, but this one, like the others, stands alone.





	February Words #21: Strange

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of my prompt series challenge for February, featuring a happier-than-the-ST future where Han, Luke, and Leia are one happy OT3 and Ben never becomes Kylo Ren.
> 
> This is related to a few of the other stories but you don’t have to have read them to understand and enjoy!
> 
> Two notes:  
> \- Ben’s last name is Organa in this continuity. See “Terrace” for explanation.  
> \- I sort of always see Han as at least as Force-sensitive as Jabba... not a Jedi, but able to resist mind tricks etc?

~13 ABY~

Ben Organa waited until his Dad Han was alone.

He must have been standing outside the cockpit for an hour. It was probably past his bedtime, too. That thought seemed a little naughty—which made him feel secretly good. Then that made him worry that maybe he was touching the Dark Side.

But mostly he was just glad Uncle Chewie didn't have the Force, and didn't notice him hiding behind the bulkhead.

"Dad?" He slipped into the cockpit as quietly as his stockinged feet could, and climbed up into the co-pilot's chair. Ben always liked sitting here, in the chair that smelled mostly like Uncle Chewie and a little like Mom--Mom Leia, even though he never called her that because he only had one Mom.

"Hey, kid." If Dad Han was surprised, he definitely didn't act like it. "Come to be my co-pilot?"

Ben almost said yes. That would have been easy. But he shook his head and said, "Not really. No."

His dad just nodded. Kept looking out the window at the purplish glow of hyperspace. Waiting for Ben to ask what he needed to ask.

He'd picked his Dad Han for a reason. Dad Luke was really good at knowing what Ben wanted to say before he said it. But he also always wanted Ben to answer his own questions, to come up with his own ideas instead of just telling him how things really were. Mom was... Mom. She was good at hugging him an kissing him and tucking him into bed, and making sure his hair was combed and his clothes were washed and he didn't get too muddy before school. But she didn't really talk about things. Not important things, anyway. And this was the most important question Ben had ever had.

"Dad?" He wished his voice sounded older. More important. Less like a whiny little kid anyway, like some of the other kids at school liked to call him.

"Yeah, Ben? What is it?"

He had to ask it, then, or he knew he would just swallow it up and decide not to. So he sat up really straight, like being taller would make him harder, and said, “Dad, what’s wrong with our family?”

“What do you mean?” Ben’s dad jumped back, almost, like something had hit him. “Nothing’s wrong with our family. What’s wrong?”

“I mean…” And Ben prodded at the uncomfortable thing that he didn’t want to say, but he had to. “Why do I have two dads?”

It was out there, then, the first uncomfortable thing, and Dad Han could feel it too, Ben knew. He started messing with the ship’s controls, even though they were in hyperspace and Ben knew the computer was flying, and he said, “Lots of kids have two dads.”

“Yeah, but why do I have two dads and a mom? That’s weird. No one else does.”

For a second, Ben thought his dad wasn’t going to answer. He just got really quiet, like he was sad. Ben wasn’t sure that what he felt in the Force was sadness though. It was more like when he had a test at school, and he knew he hadn’t studied, and it was too late to do anything but just hope for the best and answer the questions he knew.

“Come here, kid.”

Ben was maybe too big for sitting on laps. But it seemed like a good idea to him too.

“I ever tell you how I met… Leia, and Luke?”

Ben knew the answer to that one. “You and Dad Luke rescued Mom, right?”

Han laughed. “Is that what Luke told you? Yeah. Kind of. I guess. But your mom would say she rescued us, and…” His voice got really quiet, and Ben felt that not-quite-sad again. “She’d be right, you know. She did. But that’s not how it started.”

Ben twisted around so he could see his dad’s face, even though the pilot seat wasn’t really big enough for both of them.

“I met Luke first.” Han smiled, this little half-smile that felt… somewhere else. Like when Ben was thinking about Jedi stuff at school. “You know what I did before the war, right?”

Ben nodded. “You were a smuggler.”

“Do you even know what that means, kid?”

Ben didn’t. But he sort of knew, from the way people said it, that it wasn’t a thing that a lot of people would expect a New Republic general to have been.

“Ah, it doesn’t really matter. I was running cargo, mostly. Carrying stuff in this ship. And so I’m at this cantina, looking for work, and this old guy and this kid come in. Old guy was Ben Kenobi, who you’re named for. And the kid… he was just so full of life. Smiled at everything, you know? Wanted so bad to save your mom. Even though he’d never even met her. He just loved everything so much. So intense, right? Like he made the room brighter just by being there.”

Ben thought that was a funny way to talk about Dad Luke. He was always kind of serious and worried, and thinking too much about the Force and stuff. But when they were building model spaceships or something… then he smiled a lot. Maybe he’d had more time to build things back then.

“Anyway,” Dad Han went on, “I was already half in love with him, and then we met your mom. And if Luke was like a sun, she was like a supernova.”

That didn’t seem like a very nice way to describe somebody. But the way he said it was so full of love that Ben kind of thought he understood what he meant.

“She was… so confident. Like she knew what she was doing, even though none of us really did. So sure of who she was. And we’d just had our worlds turned upside down, so we kind of let her make a new one for us. It was always the three of us, after that.”

“But… isn’t that weird?” Ben didn’t really like the way his question sounded. Like one of those mean kids from school. He was pretty sure it was weird, though, for a kid to have three parents. Not stepparents, just parents. “Aren’t most people just two?”

Han laughed, but it wasn’t a happy kind of laugh, and it made Ben want to hug him. He smelled like Dad Han—like the Falcon, and like the stuff he splashed on his face when he shaved in the morning—and the hug squished some of the uncomfortable thing away.

“Yeah,” he muttered, into Ben’s hair. “I guess most people are just two. That’s just humans, though. There’s lots of other species that don’t really pair off ever. Or they have bigger families, like ours.

“For us…” he went on. “There wasn’t any question. We were never any good when we were apart. Whenever one of us got sent on a mission, it was like… like something was missing. And then Luke went off to do his Jedi training, and…”

Something went dark.

Dad Han always said he couldn’t use the Force, but Ben didn’t really think that that was true. He didn’t know he was using it, maybe, but there was something there, something that happened right before the end of the war, that he kept in a box, sectioned off.

“And then I was… away, for awhile,” he said, like he was stepping around his own uncomfortable thing. “But Luke and Leia… they came for me. And we’d been a family so long by then it wouldn’t have felt right, for just two of us to go off all alone.”

Ben nodded. He wouldn’t want his family to be just him and two of his parents. That made sense. It would be… wrong.

He could say that, he thought, to the kids at school when they got back. That they were family. That families came in all sizes.

There was just one more uncomfortable thing left to go.

“Is it true?” he blurted out all in a rush, like a ship spitting out an escape pod. “Is it true that Dad Luke is Mom’s brother?”

This time, he thought, it felt like falling. Like his question, his uncomfortable thing, had ripped the floor out from under his father.

“Who told you that?” Han’s face was pale. But it told Ben everything he needed to know.

“It’s true, then.” His voice went really quiet. “All the kids at school say they’re… wrong. They’re dirty.”

“Hey, kid. I didn’t say that.”

And even though all the uncomfortable things were out of him now, the panic rolling of his father scared Ben even more.

“Ben. Um.” Han’s voice was shaking. “Look, maybe you’d better ask them.”

“They wouldn’t answer.” The words tasted bitter. “They’d just be weird about it. That’s why I asked you.”

“Yeah.” Han sighed, and Ben wasn’t sure if he just touched him, or if his dad actually planted a kiss on top of his head. “They’d be weird about it. Okay. Well… let’s try to think of it this way. Uncle Lando’s family, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, see? You answered that right away, even though you know you’re not really related. And Uncle Chewie?”

“Of course.”

“And he’s not even human. So… what I’m trying to say, Ben, is that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you blood says. It’s more in your heart.”

That made Ben feel a little bit better. But he still didn’t think it was the same thing.

“I mean… I know you can be adopted and things, and get a new family that way,” he said. It was really important to choose the right words, because he did love his parents and he didn’t want to hurt them. Just… to know. “But it’s different, isn’t it?” he asked. “Deciding not to be family, when you already are?”

Dad Han was quiet for a really long time, but he never stopped holding Ben tight. He wasn’t angry, but he was thinking of what so say, and Ben stayed as still as he could, so the thoughts wouldn’t stop.

“I still think you ought to talk to them, kid,” he finally said, and ruffled Ben’s hair. “But the way I see it is, they didn’t decide to stop being family. You know they were both adopted, right? By different families on different worlds?”

“Yeah.”

“So when we met, they didn’t know they were anything but friends, and then more. And we loved each other, like we do now, for three whole years before they knew. Some people…” He cleared his throat, like he was coughing. “Some people still don’t think it’s right, you know?”

Ben nodded.

“But what I think, Ben, is that they were two kinds of family. And I think they were… sad, almost, when they found that out, because they thought they couldn’t be both. They had to pick one.”

“And they picked to stop being brother and sister?” Ben asks. It seems like a terrible thought. If he had a sister, he’d want to protect her. He doesn’t think he could ever just stop.

But Han said. “No. No, I don’t think they stopped that. I think they had learn it, that’s all. And it’s not really all that different, is it? Once you stop being boyfriends and girlfriends, and just become family, right?”

He wasn’t really sure, Ben thought. There was something about him that… fluttered.

“Hey, kid? I don’t want you to… you know. Be ashamed of them or anything. All right?”

“I’m not.” Ben said. And that was true. He wasn’t. Not ashamed. “It’s a little weird,” he admitted. “But we’re happy weird, right?”

Dad Han closed his eyes, and laughed this time for real. “Happy weird,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. This one was kind of hard! Tough to think about how you’d explain to a kid... I hope it worked!
> 
> As always, all feedback including concrit is welcome! :)


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